George Orwell’s doublethink

This is the most sensible and systematic interpretation of George Orwell’s books that I have ever read. It generously acknowledges the true stature of the great works — most notably, Animal Farm, Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier. It rightly sees the second world war as having brought forth some of Orwell’s finest writing. Yet it does not deify him, and it acknowledges that this strange, drawling, gawky Etonian, who wore common sense like a carapace, was occasionally as capable as the next journalist of writing undiluted tosh.

Witness his claim in an article of 1940 that if he thought a victory in the present war would mean a new lease of life for British imperialism, he would be inclined to ‘side with Russia and Germany’. Even given Orwell’s love of striking attitudes, there is something more than perverse about claiming that you would rather have the world run by the Third Reich and Stalin than by the comparatively benign Indian civil service.